195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
"These talented writers are about to embark on 14 wholly different and fascinating itineraries, from exploring ancient scrolls in Timbuktu, to the Anglican Church in Uganda, to Somaliland's elections, to name a few," says Tom Burke, the Achebe Center program manager. "It is a landmark project, and our partners - large and small - across the continent have lent enthusiasm and support. It's an exciting time to watch these pilgrimages unfold, and it will be quite something to read these books once their pages are written."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
219 p., This book investigates Kamau Brathwaite's and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates, reading them against the traditional sites of the Caribbean imaginary.
"I don't want to look arrogant, especially with [Cornel West]. But I believe he sat on the side of something he doesn't actually know," [Nancy Morejon] said of the open letter West and 59 other African Americans sent to Cuban President Raul Castro late last year. In it, they accused his government of mistreating civil rights activists and a "callous disregard" for its Black population. "Yes, there is racism in Cuba," Tomas Fernandez Robaina, a prolific writer about the social condition of Black Cubans, told me. The country "engaged in romanticism" when Castro ordered an end to racial discrimination nearly a half-century ago, Fernandez said. "Now we understand it will take more than goodwill to get rid of it, something Americans should know better than Cubans."
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., Explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with José Martí and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Díaz. The contributors consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic, and national migrations. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsides to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
191 p., Conceptualizes the idea of jolie-laide ("the beautiful ugly") as a fully elaborated sexual poetics by three women writers of the African diaspora: Gayl Jones (USA), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean), and Jackie Kay (Scotland, UK). The introductory chapter situates the study in a critical and cultural context and defines key terms. The chapters that follow analyze the thematic preoccupations and narrative strategies of the three writers' respective novels ( Corregidora and Eva's Man, The Autobiography of My Mother , and Trumpet ) and historicize the novels' explicit and implicit ideologies. With their jolie-laide portrayals of gender, the body and sex and sexuality, these three writers fashion complex representations of black female sexual subjectivity and critique the biased images, exaggerations, distortions, and silences of earlier representations. Recognizing that jolie-laide can be used to problematize racial, gender, and sexual binaries, these novelists exploit the structural possibilities of a jolie-laide sexual poetics to address culturally taboo topics in explicit, graphic, and imaginative language and with inventive jolie-laide tropes. They challenge white supremacist stereotypes of black sexuality as well as the sanitized characterizations of black sex found within the literary traditions of black respectability.
Ventura de Molina, Jacinto, b.1766 (Author), Acree,William G. (Editor), and Borucki,Alex (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Madrid: Iberoamericana
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
285 p., Contents: Mapa del Río de la Plata hacia 1800 -- Cronología sobre Molina -- El Río de la Plata en los años de Jacinto Ventura de Molina / Alex Borucki -- Un sueño realizado : un letrado negro y el poder de la escritura / William G. Akree, Jr. -- [Notas] -- Escritos de Jacinto Ventura de Molina, c. 1817-1837. Escritos históricos y autobiográficos. Los afrodescendientes en los escritos de Molina. Peticiones al poder. Molina en los escritos de sus contemporáneos / [various authors]. Defensor de los pobres. Escritos políticos y literarios.; Collection consists chiefly of works by Ventura de Molina: political, historical, literary, and legal.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
141 p., Contents: Haciendo visibles a los invisibles / Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata --
Breve introducción sobre los aportes literarios y culturales afrocolombianos --
Catálogo de la Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana --
Guía de animación a la lectura : Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana / Beatriz Helena Robledo y José Ignacio Caro.
